The novel “The Long Loud Silence” by Wilson Tucker was published for the first time in 1952. In 1969 the novel was released in a new revised edition.

Corporal Gary celebrates his birthday by getting so drunk that when he falls asleep he doesn’t realize that the area of ​​the USA east of the Mississippi was attacked. When he wakes up he finds himself in an almost empty city.

Gary discovers that the major Eastern cities were destroyed by atomic bombs and the attack was also carried in the form of bacterial contamination. Looking for a contact with the army, he realizes that along the Mississippi a cordon sanitaire was put in place with a lot of soldiers ready to shoot anyone trying to cross the river because the survivors are carriers of pneumonic plague.

Gary wants to find a way to cross the Mississippi without being killed but in the meantime he has to survive in an area where all semblance of civility has vanished and people still alive are ready to do anything to take the food and the resources still available.

“The Long Loud Silence” is a rather depressing novel not only because it’s a catastrophic / apocalyptic one but also for the pessimistic way the consequences of the atomic / bacteriological attack are described.

In many stories of this kind most survivors try to organize together to gather resources while keeping at least the basics of civilization. Sure, there are always those who try to take what they want by force and in general they’re the baddies and they get defeated. If somewhere there’s still an authority, sooner or later the survivors are able to contact them to begin a return to a semblance of normality.

In “The Long Loud Silence” survivors are usually willing to do anything to get food and anything they need. To the west of the Mississippi the U.S.A. still exist but not only they abandoned the survivors, they also put the attacked area in quarantine indefinitely.

“The Long Loud Silence” isn’t a political science fiction novel: it’s assumed that readers know the situation at the time of the Cold War but there are no references to the reasons of the attack or its consequences worldwide. The novel focuses on the story of Corporal Gary and his attempts to survive in the hope of finding a way to cross the Mississippi without being killed so readers know what the protagonist discovers during the novel.

In the desolate landscape of the eastern U.S.A. the protagonist is an anti-hero who cares only about his own survival. He has no ambitions of restoring civilization in the attacked area and he’s not interested in creating his own domain. If it’s convenient he works with other survivors, if it’s convenient he exploits them, but with no real desire to socialize. Overall, Gary is an ordinary person, with strengths, flaws and pettiness. He initially survived the attack due to his luck of being immune to pneumonic plague and then thanks to his experience in war, which in the original version is World War II while in the revised version is the Vietnam war.

During the novel however Gary quickly adapts to the collapse of civilization so that he kills several people without hesitation. The original ending written by Wilson Tucker was really strong, so much so that his publisher asked him to tone it down.

As there’s only one protagonist in “The Long Loud Silence”, while other characters are present in reduced parts of the novel, Gary is the only one developed, although actually there isn’t a particular psychological depth. On the other hand, during the novel his mind is focused on survival and on crossing the Mississippi.

Overall, “The Long Loud Silence” is a good novel that’s still worth reading because its topics go beyond the Cold War as they’re about the collapse of civilization when there’s a catastrophic event.